When MGM almost killed James Bond and replaced it with another spy franchise: “Just to prove they could”
Having been one of the most iconic franchises in Hollywood since the early 1960s, it’s impossible to imagine the cinematic landscape without James Bond. It’s almost as difficult to imagine 007 without MGM, but the studio once seriously considered permanently retiring the suave secret agent.
United Artists distributed the first 12 entries in the long-running series, but the new ownership picked up the slack when the outfit merged with MGM in the early 1980s. Since then, MGM has become almost synonymous with Bond, having been a key partner in every subsequent big-screen adventure from Octopussy on.
With the Broccoli family now out of the picture, the recently rebranded MGM Amazon Studios has more skin in the game than ever before, which makes it unthinkable that it was once contemplating sending the industry’s most famous spy out to pasture, with plans tentatively afoot to replace it.
Until the current gap between Daniel Craig’s swansong in No Time to Die and Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming film, the longest wait between Bond flicks came between the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan eras, where legal red tape and contractual small print halted 007 in his tracks.
Things dragged on for so long without a resolution in sight that MGM began considering other options. One of which was acquiring the rights to another string of spy novels, and threatening that if the ongoing impasse didn’t end, the studio would go ahead and launch another spy saga in its place.
“At one point, MGM execs became irritated with the slow progress, and they optioned the Quiller spy series of novels and threatened to churn out a Quiller film series, just to prove they could,” John Cork revealed in the book Nobody Does It Better. The bigwigs didn’t want Dalton to complete his contractually obliged third film, and without a script, story, or director, alternatives were being looked at.
Jeff Kleeman, the producer who was pivotal in relaunching Bond with GoldenEye, explained that 007’s lack of cultural relevance among its target demographic wasn’t helping matters. When Frank Mancuso was appointed chairman of MGM in 1993, he ordered a marketing survey, and the prognosis wasn’t great.
“What the marketing survey revealed that was because it had been over a decade since there had been a Bond movie that the audience cared about, the younger generation of filmgoers, the generation which studios are always seeking, was completely oblivious to Bond,” he shared. They either didn’t know who he was or viewed the character as someone their dad liked. “Neither response being impressive to MGM,” he added.
Obviously, cooler heads prevailed, and Martin Campbell’s GoldenEye spectacularly revitalised 007. The threats were never acted on, and the only feature-length adaptation of Elleston Trevor’s Quiller novels remains 1966’s The Quiller Memorandum, starring George Segal in the title role.
